Word: secularized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even on the field of battle, ranked second in dignity and priority to higher concerns. To a pious Christian, politics cannot provide a final solution because it only is concerned with this world, which is always passing away. But to American youth, immersed in a self-consciously and radically secular culture, especially at a place like Harvard, the precepts and promises of religion have diminished appeal. Limiting their perspectives to this world, youth understandably can see politics—once shorn of the ostensible cynicism of the older generations—as the catholicon of their...
These setbacks have not helped Gaydamak's chances of being elected mayor of the Holy City. He is an outsider, joining an election fray that has polarized the city's black-hatted community of ultra-Orthodox haredim from the rest of its secular inhabitants. The outcome of this race will have repercussions for the Obama Administration's Israel-Palestinian peace plans, since the dilemma of Jerusalem - whether it will be shared with the Palestinians or remain the undivided Jewish capital - lies at the heart of any future accord. Gaydamak's rivals for the mayoralty are an ultra-Orthodox...
Over the last few decades, the secular study of religion on America's campuses has become a right-wing pinata. In the full understanding that they are swimming against the cultural, if not the academic, stream the folks at the new Institute pulled out Rushdie, who, although he is not one of their faculty members, writes fiction that acknowledges the centrality of faith to culture without the author's pious participation. From his astounding breakthrough work, Midnight's Children, through his current The Enchantress of Florence, he has been obsessed with both formal and informal belief, but from the point...
...language on certain topics. "I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words," he said. "For instance, 'soul." I don't believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn't a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you're religious or not you may find yourself obliged to use language shaped by religion...
...Rushdie resumed his version of a normal life: there was no obvious security at last week's event. But that experience allowed him to make a strong indirect point in favor of the new Institute. Conservative clerics and talk show hosts have complained bitterly at the way that secular universities treat religion - sometimes justifiably. When scholars insist on seeing faith as a brute exercise in authoritarianism they are being almost as reductive as religious fundamentalists. But at its best, secular religious study continues to offer a freedom that institutions entrenched firmly in one or another faith tradition can simply...